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Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

No opinion on Estonia and its e-government, but running a country like a tech company sounds like a plot of a comedy set in a dystopia. I certainly hope that Estonia is ran better than most tech company

Tech companies have many problems that I don't want see in a Government:

- Security breaches (and just like every other tech company Bulgaria recently had a dump of the personal data of 5 million citizens)

- Privacy issues, like contractors listening in on sounds recorded by their devices

- tons of intrusive ads

- discrinatory pricing

- products people rely on being killed off for no reason

- hype-, and resume-driven development

- general lack of accountability, masked with trendy but misunderstood methodologies like Agile, Scrum

- move fast and break things works for Facebook, but not for health insurance software

Tech companies fail all the time, but the pieces are picked up by investors, yet governments cannot afford to fail in the same way.

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Most countries are ran far worse than a company. If citizens had the option to freely jump between countries, most of them would go bankrupt, that's why they rely on coercion. Very few countries are ran efficiently and they re typically very small like Singapore.

I feel like the only people that can honestly say this are those that are not familiar with just how poorly ran a lot of companies tend to be.

The major difference being that an inept government is generally much more visible than an inept company. But as someone that's worked both commercial and government, I've seen enough to make a definitive statement that a lot of companies are incredibly poorly ran. You just don't see it.

the major difference is that countries cannot die, no matter how poorly ran

Countries have a different purpose than companies. It hardly makes sense to compare them.

Companies can fire people. Countries cannot. Companies are typically not democratically controlled whereas countries should be. Companies are not obligated to meet the basic needs of their employees, protect their rights even if it isn't profitable, defend against foreign adversaries.

Companies have one, very narrow, purpose and efficiency is one property which is induced by that arrangement. States, on the other hand, are human institutions constituted to much broader purpose and scope. I'd actually argue its deeply inhuman to expect efficiency to be a primary property of a state.

Usually only the country one would move to is restricting movement. So what the hell are you talking about?

Obviously, lots of countries people would move _from_ would restrict movement as well. See countries from the former communist block.

Exactly

Actually, reading the article, it seems that "like a Tech company" is just a click-bait title.

The point is that Estonia invested in Internet connectivity penetration, computer literacy for children (and adults too probably), and moved or instituted many/most government services on-line.

Wow! Exactly the same I thought about the article. Also it has to do with country's scale as Estonia can afford to take risks given their small population size comparing to, say, UK. By the way, some observations can be just "Hype", because whether your country relies on tech or not, tech adaptation for society welfare and political welfare is more about pragmatics than planning.

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